Highlights of Science

Open Access

Open access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access journals are publishing Creative Commons-licensed research, which promotes access and re-use of scientific and scholarly research.

Open access publication increases the exposure of new works and allows them to be disseminated to a much wider audience. It also helps eliminate the information bias towards the developed world, where institutions are much more likely to have the resources to reach the traditional subscription-based journals than elsewhere.

Open Access at Highlights of Science

All the papers published in Highlights of Science journals are immediately available under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0) so that any interested public can have free access to the published content. This means everyone from around the world will have unlimited free access to the full text and is free to re-use the published material on condition that proper accreditation/citation of the original publication (the authorship of the work and initial publication in this journal) is given, regardless of affiliation.

In the meantime, authors retain the copyright to their work and are free to use, reuse and share their articles without any embargo period, provided that the journal is acknowledged as the original venue of publication (properly cite the published articles). Authors are also permitted and encouraged to deposit their published work anywhere they wish (e.g., their institutional repositories or personal websites) prior to, during, and after the submission process and publication of the article.

Unlike the traditional subscription-based journals, Highlights of Science does not take copyright for articles published in Open Access, nor set any kind of access barrier for generating income from, for example, either subscription or article view/download. As such, Highlights of Science charges authors Article Processing Charges (APCs) (usually covered by their affiliated institutes) to ensure long-term and sustainable open access publishing, and to finance the publication activities and infrastructures.